HP Omnibook XE3 Running slow suddenly

[Revvy]

This machine has worked fine for a few years however in the last week or so it has been running unuseably slow. 30 mins to boot up, 5 mins opening small text documnets etc. There were no reasource hungry proccesses running and the disk is more than half empty. Occasionally it would freeze up completely.

I spent a while defraging, running checks, tiding up but to no avail. In the end I have reformatted the hard disk (just in case there was a virus or some rogue software)and reinstalled the OS but the result with only the OS loaded is not much better than before. I have run diagnostics on the system and everything is working ok (apparently).

On other posts I have noticed references to hard drives dying etc is this common?? Similar effects??

Nothing has changed on the laptop in months, the spec is as follows:
Celeron 1.1 GHz
hd 20GB
RAM 256MB
OS XP Pro (initally with all the updates).

Any Ideas??

 

[garebo]

Well, its likely either the h drive or the ram.
Im not up on notebooks, but, if you have more than one ram stick, try using only one at a time, see if that helps.
Also, you can google "memtest" and download it for free and test each ram module you have.
If the ram is ok then, yes, it could be the hard drive.
But sometimes its a built-in nic or modem that is the cause.
You might even try disabling all the items that you can disable, usually done thru device mgr, and see if that affects your speed. If so, you have found the culprit.

If you dont know the h drive mfgr then you can google and download for free the prog called "everest" and it will tell you which h drive you have. Then go to h drive mfgr and download their diagnostic program for free and run it.
This would be a good start into seeing just what the prob is.
However, before you do all this, check your manual and re-set the bios first, that may take care of the problem.


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